Most PHP developers will use a text editor to build their sites, hand editing the bulk of the code to add everything from the basic database interface to the top end user-level interface and functionality. In general it is not the best of environments and often leads to developers getting bogged down in the minutiae of the process, rather than focus on the functionality of the application they are developing. Part of the reason for this is the comparatively disjointed nature of development; you edit the code in a text editor but can only really access the content through a web browser. Qcodo aims to simplify the development of the core of your application by allowing you to build the application definition and have the code written for you, freeing up you (or your developers) to work on the functionality and interface sides.

Zope is a web application server, based around and closely modeling the Python programming language. It's open source and has a very rich development environment that makes it easy for people to develop extensions and enhancements for interfacing to different products and services. Zope is one of those projects that I reluctantly call forgotten. It's not the right term, but with some additional explanation you'll see where I'm coming from. Zope is not, in any way languishing (quite the opposite), but it is a technology and application that people simply use and deploy web sites and applications - often forgetting the significance of the environment in which they are deploying their application.

Greg Nawrocki has some interesting comments on open source's new target: systems management.

He argues that projects like Globus and Xen could lead to new range of open source based system management projects.

One of the common arguments against Open Source and Linux is that much of it is all too new and unproven. A key part of the Open Source market is the Perl programming language, and yesterday Perl celebrated its 18th birthday. At 18, Perl predates Windows (but admittedly not DOS) - even when wider adoption of Perl occurred at Perl 4 (21/3/1991), and Linux (1992). Even Linux is 13. As to maturity of the products, would companies like Amazon and Bank of Canada use Perl ? (check out MasonHQ's pages on users of the HTML::Mason module for a complete listof users of just one module.